Before the Flavored Oil Trend, There Was 'Agrumato'

Summary

The Ricci fam­ily has been pro­duc­ing Agrumato olive oil, a blend of Gentile olives and native cit­rus fruits, in Abruzzo, Italy since the 1980s, with the recipe kept secret within the fam­ily. Despite some con­tro­versy over the fla­vored oil cat­e­gory, Ricci and Beramendi have seen suc­cess with Agrumato, which has helped bring chefs and con­sumers into the olive oil world and is exported to numer­ous coun­tries.

Widely con­sid­ered a pio­neer in the fla­vored olive oil cat­e­gory, the Ricci fam­ily has crafted Agrumato olive oil from Gentile olives and a range of native cit­rus fruit in the cen­tral Italian region of Abruzzo since the 1980s.

Francesco Ricci, whose fam­ily coined the term, insists that Agrumato is a reg­is­tered trade­mark that describes their brand and is not a pro­duc­tion method, an adjec­tive, or a verb. 

“It’s a pro­pri­etary and secret recipe,” Ricci told Olive Oil Times through a trans­la­tor, Rolando Beramendi, an award-win­ning importer and the founder of Manicaretti Italian Food Importers, who sells Agrumato in the United States. ​“For exam­ple, you will never know what’s in Campari or Coca-Cola.”

Unsurprisingly, Ricci declined to share many details about the process, which he spent much of the 1980s tweak­ing and fine-tun­ing before releas­ing the first Agrumato on the mar­ket after the 1989 har­vest.

Instead, Ricci insisted that only imme­di­ate fam­ily mem­bers, includ­ing his chil­dren, know the recipe, whom he hopes will con­tinue the Agrumato legacy.

“It’s olives and lemons being crushed together and going through the same process as extra vir­gin olive oil,” he said, high­light­ing that Agrumato is made using ded­i­cated milling equip­ment.

Ricci added that Gentile olives are key to Agrumato, as they are locally grown, have a mild fla­vor pro­file that does not clash with the cit­rus fla­vors, and ripen at around the same time as the cit­rus, allow­ing the com­pany to har­vest quickly and mill both fruits con­cur­rently.

Along with lemon, the Ricci fam­ily sells Agrumato, made with orange, blood orange, berg­amot orange, tan­ger­ine, cit­ron, and lemon, along with herbs.

The secret to Agrumato’s suc­cess, which Beramendi said pop­u­lar­ized the fla­vored olive oil cat­e­gory and has held up as the gold stan­dard of its pro­duc­tion, lies in the pro­por­tions.

“So every­body copied that, but imi­ta­tion is the great­est form of flat­tery,” Beramendi said. 

Indeed, search­ing for the term ​“agru­mato method” in any main­stream search engine yields pages of olive oil pro­ducer web­sites, many of which are from California, where Agrumato was first imported by Beramendi in 1991. These web­sites describe a method of co-milling freshly har­vested olives with a range of fresh fruits, veg­eta­bles, and herbs.

Beramendi and Ricci fre­quently send cease-and-desist notices for the incor­rect use of the term, but this has not stopped some of the largest olive oil pro­duc­ers in the U.S. from pub­li­ciz­ing ​“agru­mato method” or ​“agru­mato style” olive oil on their web­sites.

Part of the rea­son for the judi­cious pro­tec­tion of their intel­lec­tual prop­erty stems from the rig­or­ous process the Ricci fam­ily had to undergo to have the prod­uct cer­ti­fied as extra vir­gin.

“When we first came out with the prod­uct and had to have it cer­ti­fied, I went to the University of Perugia… and had to fight quite a big bat­tle to be cer­ti­fied extra vir­gin olive oil with lemon,” Ricci said. ​“The chem­i­cal analy­sis of the prod­uct shows it is 100 per­cent an extra vir­gin olive oil. It has aroma and a hint of fla­vor, but to all intents and pur­poses, it’s an extra vir­gin olive oil.”

According to the International Olive Council, any grade of olive oil, includ­ing extra vir­gin, is a sin­gle-ingre­di­ent food and can­not con­tain addi­tives. 

“Flavored oils can­not be con­sid­ered olive oils,” and they can­not be labeled as such under IOC rules, for­mer exec­u­tive direc­tor Abdellatif Ghedira told Olive Oil Times in 2018.

Ricci and Beramendi dis­agree, point­ing to the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion from the University of Perugia, and stated that they do not engage in debate over the nomen­cla­ture of fla­vored olive oil. 

Instead, they point to pub­lic enthu­si­asm for the prod­uct as evi­dence that the name is just right, includ­ing awards in 2023 from the Specialty Food Association and the Fancy Food Show for the then-newly released Agrumato Bergamotto.

More broadly, Ricci explains that he believes fla­vored and infused olive oil are help­ing to bring chefs and reg­u­lar con­sumers into the world of olive oil. Beramendi agreed, cit­ing per­sonal expe­ri­ence work­ing with promi­nent chefs from lead­ing California restau­rants. 

“I see it as a prod­uct that broke the glass ceil­ing,” he added. ​“Agrumato was an impor­tant pil­lar of why peo­ple started to use extra vir­gin olive oil as a fin­ish­ing oil. It was a pio­neer.”

Along with the U.S., the Ricci fam­ily exports Agrumato to 17 other coun­tries. The United Kingdom is the sec­ond-largest mar­ket, with Australia, Germany, Japan, Singapore and South Korea also rep­re­sent­ing sig­nif­i­cant mar­kets.

Ricci esti­mated that Agrumato sales account for approx­i­mately 95 per­cent of the busi­ness, with the remain­ing 5 per­cent com­prised of sales of three mono­va­ri­etal extra vir­gin olive oils and Pan’Agrumato, a panet­tone made with Agrumato.

With two recent reports fore­cast­ing that the fla­vored olive oil mar­ket will nearly dou­ble over the next decade, ris­ing from $1.29 (€1.19) bil­lion in 2024 to $2.47 (€2.10) bil­lion by 2033, Ricci and his imi­ta­tors are hop­ing to cap­i­tal­ize on the category’s momen­tum and con­tinue to grow mar­ket share for Agrumato and other co-milled olive oil.